When the mayor told him the job came with a brand-new, fully loaded, armored Hummer, Mike thought he was joking. He asked if most Clairmonters carried grenades and ran from crime scenes on foot, in which case the Hummer would be fine. When nobody in the room laughed, he said he preferred a basic high-speed cruiser.
I didn’t press him too hard on his doubts.
“It’s not forever,” he said, shrugging, and my relief flowed, a swift river.
Because, at that point, I wanted to go.
I wanted to run.
Two months ago, my past had snaked its way into our New York apartment on a rainy afternoon while Mike was hunkered down on a case somewhere. He could have been a hundred miles or two minutes away, dodging bullets or playing cards in a safe room, I never knew.
There was so much he never told me about the details of what he did for a living and so much I didn’t tell him about what lay at the core of me. On the bad days of our marriage, our secrets circled us like ghosts, blowing an icy draft between us. Would we love each other the same if we knew what the other was capable of?
I remember holding the violent message in shaking fingers, as the soft rain turned to hail, a thousand fingernails tapping on the living room windows, wishing Mike were there so I could finally tell him everything. He showed up at the apartment ten hours later, exhausted and bruised, after I’d tucked the piece of paper away in a shoebox with all of the others.
That is the short story of how we ended up here in the Southern hemisphere, seeking warmth. Mike turned in his resignation and I quit the gallery, promising to take it easy until the baby was born, with the idea that I’d take up my painting again. Life was suddenly an open, blank canvas that we could sketch with careful hands.
“Go away,” I said now, as Mike’s fingers began to roam again. “Go make out with yourself. It’s acceptable in the second trimester.”
He stood, his large frame blocking my view of the couple in the mirror. Not budging.
Now it was just us. The real us.
Flesh and blood and flaws.
I fought a sudden urge to cry, which seemed to be happening about every fifteen minutes these days. Losing this man would kill me. I pulled his head down and traced my tongue along his mouth. I felt the rush of familiar heat that had sustained us through everything. He drew away for a second, grinning.
“Is this hello or goodbye?”
I pushed him back onto the bed.
Maybe I could help him out a little.
Fourteen minutes later, adjusting the seat in my newly purchased, pre-owned Volvo station wagon, I tipped down white wraparound sunglasses picked up off the streets of New York for ten bucks, and took one last pass at myself in the rearview mirror. Not too bad. My green eyes were made less weary by dark blue eyeliner, the splash of gold in the center of the iris more noticeable than usual.
I’d opted for a bold New York/Texas compromise: a body-hugging black cotton-Lycra dress that left no doubt about my state of maternity and over-the-top, gem-studded gold flats bought at a Barneys sale two years ago.
My body buzzed pleasantly. It seemed wrong to love the thing that had ripped my life apart. But sex set me free in a way nothing else did.
I plugged Caroline Warwick’s address into the navigation system that Mike insisted I’d need as a person born without directional ability. He’d bought the GPS from a friend setting up an online business of British paraphernalia, so my guide ordered me around like a bored Hugh Grant.
As the sun slid down in an orange halo, I found myself on the outskirts of Clairmont, driving for 2.3 miles on a farm road, a field of rising corn on one side and a rolling stone wall on the other. When Hugh crisply ordered me to turn, I did so with relief, away from the corn and toward the façade of a medieval-style gatehouse. Fields of corn always remind me of a gang of children wielding farm tools and a childhood slumber party where I didn’t sleep a wink. Thank you, Stephen King.
I could see instantly that I had entered a land of surreal-dom. A little city of copper turrets and tile rooftops lay beyond the stone wall, a glittering mirage on the prairie. The gold letters set into the limestone wall announced THE MANSES OF CASTLEGATE. I rolled slowly forward and halted at a miniature stop sign that looked like it belonged at a Renaissance Faire. For a second, I wondered if Hugh had the magical powers to transplant this place from across the Pond.
A sun-beaten troll of a man in a beige uniform sat in cramped air-conditioned quarters, nursing a Diet Coke and watching Wheel of Fortune on a tiny TV. I wondered if his prior life involved tending the field across the way.
“Yep?” he drawled, sliding open the window.
“I’m here for a party at Caroline Warwick’s. My name is Emily Page.”
Manses were supposed to be the homes of ministers, not vulgar rich people, a detail I remembered from a Scottish architecture course, and something I’m sure my troll friend didn’t want to hear from an uppity New Yorker. He ran his finger down a small computer screen, found my name, punched a button. The iron gates swung open easily into a pseudo-snotty fake England.
Why did people who could afford multimillion-dollar castles like this install their 15,000-square-foot homes on postage-stamp front yards, forty feet apart from neighbors on either side? While the general impression was grand, after a block or two, the cupolas, curved stony walls, and widow’s walks blurred together like a theme park.
A few twisty detours on cobbled streets designed to invoke the feel of the Ripper’s old London, and I turned off the ignition at 4203 Elizabeth Drive, a faux palace half the size of our New York apartment building.
The ivy-covered brick archway to Caroline Warwick’s manor rose to the sky. Mike had told me that in Texas, the height of the front-porch arch directly correlated to the price of the house. It was like a house bragging about its penis size. And this was a top-dollar, porn-star penis.
As for my own house hunt, I had quickly abandoned the newer subdivisions after five days of drifting through bland, light-filled spaces with half the rooms already wired for flat screens. Our real estate agent expressed dismay when Mike and I stumbled across a wood-frame fixer-upper a few streets outside of Clairmont’s historic downtown and fell in love. A giant live oak in the front yard, honeysuckle run amuck, a stone fireplace, a wraparound porch, sixty-year-old wiring, and a kitchen that felt cramped with three people in it, including the one in the womb. Still, it was twice the kitchen space of our Manhattan apartment. Now staring at the formidable home in front of me, I considered a U-turn back to my bed.
“Honey, open up. Don’t be shy.”
My head whipped around to see a woman’s pudgy hot-pink manicured fist banging vigorously on the window, the other balancing a plate of something triple-covered with Saran Wrap. I switched off the ignition and opened the door two inches, straight into the rolls of her stomach pressed against my window.
“Watch it. You’re going to spill Aunt Eloise’s Lemon Squares. They’re not quite set. Here, carry them.”
She deigned to move a few inches back and I squeezed by, grabbing the plate dripping from her fingers. She didn’t seem to notice that Aunt Eloise’s Lemon Squares nearly fertilized the grass.
“You must be Emily,” she told me. “I’d die to have had a little pregnant basketball like that but my family’s all big-boned. That dress is a little tight on you, don’t you think? You’re a pale one. I guess it’s New Yorky. If you want, I can get you into a tanning bed real cheap. My cousin Marsha Lynn Gayle runs the best facility, about seven miles from here, in Keller. Her motto is, ‘Tanned fat looks better than white fat.’ I told her she should paint it on the door.”